Teachers ‘focused on saving their students'

The principal and another staff member at an elementary school in Connecticut had rushed a gunman who forced his way inside, an act of courage that cost both of them their lives, a school superintendent said Saturday. In all, the gunman killed 26 people, 20 of them children, in the nation's second-deadliest school shooting.

The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, 47, of Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, was running at the gunman “in order to protect her students” when she was shot, Superintendent Janet Robinson, said. The school psychologist also tried to stop the gunman and was killed, Robinson told reporters in brief remarks outside the school.

“Teachers were really, really focused on saving their students,” she added.

The chilling details about the opening moments of the bloodbath in Newtown came as investigators pressed for information about the gunman, Adam Lanza, 20. A police spokesman, Lt. J. Paul Vance, said investigators had produced “some very good evidence,” but he provided no explanation for the massacre.

Vance said the victims' bodies had been taken from the school, Sandy Hook Elementary. He said the one survivor, a woman who was shot and wounded at the school, would be “instrumental” in piecing together what had happened.

Contradicting earlier reports, Robinson said Lanza's mother, Nancy Lanza, had never been a teacher or a substitute teacher at the school, though she did not specifically say whether she had had any other connection to the place.

Officials said the killing rampage began early Friday at the house where Lanza had lived with his mother. He shot her in the face, the authorities said, then, after taking three guns that apparently belonged to her, he drove her car to the school.

Lanza forced his way into the school, apparently defeating an intercom system that was supposed to keep people out during the day.

“He was not voluntarily let into the school at all,” Vance said.

Even before the medical examiner had released the identities of the victims, some were being mourned on the Internet. One was Ana Greene, 6, the daughter of jazz saxophonist Jimmy Greene, who had moved to Newtown in July.

President Barack Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address to mourn the victims, saying that “every parent in America has a heart heavy with hurt.”

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